A Blogging Experiment by Zvi S. Rosen – All views are my own. Those who do not remember IP history are doomed to relitigate it.

The Promise and Perils of Protecting Sound Recordings with Common Law Copyright

It’s been too long since an update…and I had a couple of interesting old things to share. However, then the Northern District of Illinois granted a motion to dismiss in Sheridan v. iHeartmedia, and I needed to say a bit about it. Some posts have been focusing on the fact that the Court found that performance rights do not exist at common law, but I think the Court actually went substantially further, and substantially abrogated civil protections for sound recordings made before 1972 in Illinois (a state criminal statute still exists for commercial record piracy). In this post I will (hopefully) explain the doctrine, and why this case is a much bigger deal than is being commonly stated. Finally, as always, I’ll include a tidbit from the archives.

As I’ve mentioned a number of times before, I have an article forthcoming on common-law copyright (edits are still being done by the Cincinnati Law Review). In that piece I largely take as a given that common-law copyright protects sound recordings made before February 15, 1972, and then spend close to 100 pages exploring what exactly that means, focusing on the question of performance rights particularly and differences between statutory federal copyright law and common-law state copyright law. And regarding New York and California, at least, that is a fairly safe presumption – given the (cryptic and outdated) California statute, coupled with caselaw from the New York Court of Appeals. However, in other states the applicability of common-law copyright to pre-1972 sound recordings is suddenly appearing questionable, and I wanted to explore a bit what that means.

My article tells the story in much more detail, but as a result of a series of cases culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1908 decision in White-Smith v. Apollo, Courts and the Copyright Office came to understand that the 1909 Copyright Act did not protect mechanical reproductions of musical compositions (i.e. discs or piano rolls) as being protected by copyright law. This began to be controversial in the 1930s, where big bands began to worry about radio stations using their recordings to compete with their (extremely lucrative) live radio programs. Fred Waring and Paul Whiteman were the two primary litigants in these suits, and Waring found success, both at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and at a Federal District Court in North Carolina (although North Carolina and several other states would abrogate these decisions by statute). Whiteman on the other hand had his position rejected by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which would partially reverse itself in 1955 in the case of Capitol v. Mercury.

It is axiomatic that common law protected a creative work (under the pre-1978 laws) until it was published, but publication destroyed common-law copyright, leaving only the possibility of statutory copyright. The arguments at issue in all these cases involved a fundamental question – is a sound recording that is commercially sold “published” within the meaning of copyright law?1 If publication occurred then no rights exist at common law, but if publication did not occur despite the public sale of the phonorecord, then common-law rights remain.

The argument that the sale of phonorecords does not constitute a publication of the sound recording they contain is bipartite. The first part is objective, and argues that selling a record is more akin to public performance (which is not publication) than public sale (which is), because the record is just a captured performance. Because the American rule is that performance is not publication, therefore commercial sale of a record does not constitute a publication. The other half is subjective, and notes that a publication is a dedication to the public, and that the bandleaders in question did not intend to dedicate their recordings to the public without any intellectual property protections – accordingly the records were not “published” and common-law protection remains.

In the 1960s piracy became a serious problem with the advent of prerecorded tapes, and state common law would prove insufficient as a remedy. In 1971 sound recordings were brought within federal law, but this amendment applied only to sound recordings made February 15, or thereafter, of 1972 leaving state common-law copyright as the main source of legal protection for sound recordings made before that point against unauthorized exploitation . Shortly thereafter the US Supreme Court confirmed that state-law protections for sound recordings older than 1972 were both Constitutional and not preempted by the federal statute. A few decades passed, and the New York Court of Appeals once again affirmed that sound recordings from before 1972 remained unpublished in that state.

And that has remained the bedrock of a rich panoply of litigation in recent years over whether the common law right includes a performance rights. And at least in New York state that has resulted in a decision I took issue with that pre-1972 sound recordings lack a performance right. However, as the issue comes before other states, Courts are showing skepticism of the underlying argument made by Waring & Whiteman, both because it’s a transparent (if possibly necessary) legal fiction and because it offers a convenient way to resolve these cases neatly. And as mentioned whether there has been a publication that destroys common law copyright is a question of state law, so we possibly have fifty different standards for whether sale of a phonorecord constitutes publication of the sound recording it embodies – and most states have no caselaw on this specific question.

This leads us to the Sheridan decision which is the spur for this posting. In concluding that the motion to dismiss on common-law grounds should be granted, the Court held that “There is no dispute that the Sheridans voluntarily sold their recordings. When they did so, the Sheridans lost their common law right to control the public performance of those recordings in Illinois (and pretty much everywhere else).” This doesn’t leave the Sheridans without legal protection (48 out of 50 states, including Illinois, have criminal statutes aimed at commercial record piracy. However, these statutes do not go beyond commercial copying and resale, and leave the putative owner of the recording at common law without any civil remedies in most cases.

What happens when a state’s highest court holds that sound recordings are not published? Is federalization finally going to get the boost it needs from stakeholders? Surely leaving such a situation in place would be unacceptable to the owners of the sound recording? I’m curious to find out.

As promised, a tidbit from the archives. The Whiteman v. RCA case has a fascinating file, at the New York location of the National Archives. It includes extensive deposition testimony and more. One thing that I’m not aware of having been circulated is the District Court’s findings of fact and conclusions of law, which are substantially more detailed than its published opinion. Sadly I only have cell phone pictures of the Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law (PDF 10 MB), but here it is.

I planned on having a whole separate section on whether the protection for pre-1972 sound recordings is really common-law at all – many commentators in the mid-20s century said no, including Nimmer. But that’s really a matter of semantics, fun as those are, and this post is more than long enough already.

One interesting (to me at least) question is whether this question of publication is a matter of state or federal law. I go into this more in the paper, but I’m inclined to think that the question of whether a publication occurred to destroy common-law copyright (a “divestative” publication) is a question of state law, except a successful federal registration is one of the ways common-law copyright is destroyed. On the other hand, whether sufficient publication occurred to have a valid registration under the terms of the 1909 copyright act (a so-called “investative publication”) is a question of federal law. One nice benefit of this understanding is that it clarifies that the differentiation between investative and divestative publication is not an artificial legal construct – they are actually two different things. ↩

Share this:

Author: Zvi S. Rosen

Lawyer and sometimes academic. I've written a fair deal about the evolution of intellectual property law into its present form, this blog is a way to share things that don't fit into a full-length article.
View all posts by Zvi S. Rosen